The elusive phone of the future

John Berger, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, May 23, 1999

Back in the '50s, visionaries knew what the '90s would be like.

People would rocket to work using a personal jet pack, or maybe glide in a luxurious hovercar. At home, robots would tend to their domestic needs. When Mom called, a global citizen of the year 1999 would talk to her on a gleaming videophone.

OK, so maybe the visionaries were a little off.

Robots are crawling through volcanic craters, slaving away on assembly lines, and pulling dangerous shifts with the bomb squad. Personal jet packs and hovercars are still languishing in research and development hell.

And the videophone? In one form or another, the videophone has been a technical reality for six decades. But it has never caught on in the consumer marketplace, hampered by high price as well as cultural and mobility factors. Despite the availability of technology, our telephones still resemble those of the Flintstones more than the Jetsons.

That may be changing soon. The Kyocera Corp., based in Kyoto, Japan, this week announced the newest version of the device - a mobile unit called the Visual Phone VP-210, to be marketed initially in Japan.

Will this be the videophone that finally succeeds? Let's take a look at what's happened to some of its predecessors.

The first videoconference took place in a crosstown event, held by AT&T's Bell Labs in the '30s in New York. In 1964, AT&T introduced the first actual videophone, according to Gene Fredericks, president of EdisonWest Inc., a software company based in Emeryville.

Known as the Picturephone, it was a digital device that was too far ahead of telephone line technology to be used by the general public. The phone lines around the country at that time lacked a sufficient capacity to carry data - what we now call "bandwidth."

During the next several years, various companies - including Japanese electronics giants Hitachi and Toshiba - would introduce similar products, but these failed to ignite the imagination of the general public.

A number of factors contributed to the videophone's failure to catch on.

The first personal video conferencing system, called the Cameo, was introduced in 1990 by AT&T and Compression Labs Inc. It worked with a personal computer - and cost under $5,000, a breakthrough at the time.

The videophone is still pricey, and corporate-quality videoconferencing equipment is even pricier. Just a few years ago, a business teleconferencing set-up could cost $40,000 or more. The trend now is toward cheaper systems.

"The price point for decent quality systems has been getting below $5,000 per unit, and some even lower than that," said Fredericks, who spent several years designing and implementing videoconferencing systems. Relatively low-quality systems can cost as little as $1,000 per unit, he said.

While such prices put middle to high-end videoconferencing within reach of most businesses, it's still too much for the consumer market.

The low end, however, is beginning to fall in line.

Computer-based videoconferencing products have made the biggest dent in consumer-market prices - under $300 (not including the price of the computer) for a hardware / software bundle called "Create and Share," made by Santa Clara-based Intel Corp.

Some actual videophones - standalone units without a computer - retail for less. Kyocera's mobile Visual Phone is set to debut with a suggested retail price around 40,000 yen - roughly equivalent to $325.

Cultural hurdles&lt;

Computer-based products require a certain level of comfort with technology on the part of the consumer, and also require the consumer to have friends with the same levels of comfort and disposable income.

Although some computer makers, such as Compaq Computer Corp., have started bundling videophone technology into plug-and-play desktop computers, such setups are still more the exception than the rule.

But the advance of computer technology and the dawn of the Internet have also helped by breeding a culture that is more ready for a product like the videophone.

"Now that we have the Net and Web-based things, and that kind of connectivity, people are getting used to the notion" that information can be shared in nontraditional ways, Fredericks said. "That's something that's wholly new. A technology can sit dormant waiting for another technology to make it a cogent success."

The growing presence of the Web has sparked some interest among consumers.

Primevision Technologies, a teleconferencing consulting firm and retailer of related products and computers based in Pleasanton, splits its business pretty evenly between consumers and businesses, according to Ven Baisa, Primevision's vice president.

He said families with children in college are increasingly turning to computer-based teleconferencing technology to make a more personal connection between home and school.

Most of Primevision's products require a computer to work, although Baisa said some standalone units cost as little as $250 each - with the caveat, of course, that both ends of the conversation must have the same unit in order to use the video feature.

Mobility&lt;

Mobility issues have also hampered the use of videophone technology, but they are less obvious obstacles.

In this age of wireless and cellular phones, people are resistant to the idea of sitting still, staying in the frame of a videophone camera.

Perhaps more significantly, the stationary model videophone curtails what the product can do - all it's good for is showing the faces of the people on the line.

The new mobile Visual Phone breaks that barrier and opens up new, utilitarian possibilities for the technology.

Kyocera is promoting the Visual Phone for a variety of uses. The company offers the example a construction manager using the phone to illustrate the status of a work site to the home office. While perhaps a little optimistic, the example illustrates the liberation mobility can provide.

Although the Visual Phone is currently set for release only in Japan, Primevision's Baisa is confident it will make the leap overseas.

"More than likely, we'll carry it somewhere down the line," he said.

The market may be much broader by the time it gets here.

"You could use it for anything from streaming video on down," Edison West's Fredericks said.

The concept of using the videophone to televise something other than a face transforms the nature of the machine, he said. The changes in mobility and culture could overcome the videophone's long, losing record.

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"Now it's not really about just seeing the person you're calling. It's about seeing what's in their mind's eye. It's about collaboratively seeing the same thing, having a mental picture of what's going on," he said.

"That changes the whole thing, too. People weren't thinking about that in '64, '74, '84, even '94. Maybe they will in '04." &lt;

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